I am taking care of two fish this weekend. One is a nice, respectable goldfish. It’s orange and black, it lives alone in a bubbling tank with some seaweed and a little fake wooden log to swim through. It eats a few pellets of food every few days. The other has three eyes, and it […]
Animals
In 2015, I wrote a post ostensibly about a funny-looking seabird called the booby. It’s about evolution and biology I suppose but in truth, it’s really about the forces of nature that drive at least some of our actions. And how those forces aren’t always good. In my last post I made the case for why we […]
“The Silver Lake Wolves” sounds like the title of a young adult novel, or possibly an indie rock band with lots of close harmony and beards. Actually, it was the name given by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) and the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to a small family of wolves […]
This summer, the Bramble Cay melomys, a reddish-brown rodent that resembles a large mouse, made international news. In mid-June, the Guardian reported that the melomys, last seen in 2009, had been confirmed extinct in its only known habitat, a tiny, isolated coral outcrop in the narrow strait between Australia and New Guinea. “First mammal species wiped […]
The People of LWON and their splendid guests have several ongoing preoccupations, and rather than have you try to mentally collate them over the years, we thought we’d devote a week to each preoccupation. That way they’ll all be in one place. This week is devoted to redux posts on loving bugs. “Oh my god is […]
Ann: Jenny has a new book out. It’s part of a series — best-selling, mind you — about unlikely relationships between animals and surprising animal heroics. (This one is called Unlikely Friendships: Dogs. It has a lot of dogs in it.) So far, I’ve read only the Amazon Read-Inside story about the dog and […]
A few years ago, while working on a story on the shark fin trade, I found myself freezing in the back of a panga 25 miles out from the Baja shoreline wishing I was dead. Partly it was tossing seas that pitched the skiff from side to side and slapped over the gunwales. Partly it […]
I’ve always had mixed feelings about tracking animals with satellite tags. It’s so cool that we can now see where creatures go, sometimes moment-by-moment, but I wonder about losing a bit of the mystery that surrounds some of their lives. (In the animal uprising, privacy issues may be high on their long list of injustices.) […]
